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Sunkist Brings Fresh Citrus Heritage to a New Generation
Sunkist's 'We Were There' is a 2018 Food and Drink campaign created by Edelman for Sunkist Growers, designed to reintroduce the 125-year-old California-based citrus cooperative to a Millennial audience in the United States by anchoring the brand to authentic everyday life moments across a heritage-driven anthem film and multi-platform media rollout.
The campaign marked Sunkist's first national advertising effort in more than a decade, according to MediaPost. That gap made reintroduction the primary strategic imperative. Rather than launching a new product or promotional offer, Sunkist and Edelman pursued an institutional branding direction — one that positioned the cooperative not as a legacy relic but as a constant, quietly present companion across generations of American life, from small daily rituals to milestone moments.
The campaign launched in late February 2018 in the United States, with a formal announcement on March 30, 2018, as reported by MediaPost, and ran through May 2018 to align with peak citrus-season months. Its creative centrepiece was a one-minute-fifteen-second anthem film, supported by thirty-second and fifteen-second cutdown versions. Distribution spanned Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, targeted connected TV, Pandora, Spotify, digital display, rich media, and paid search, according to ckswanson.com. The multi-channel architecture reflected the campaign's ambition to meet Millennial consumers at every digital touchpoint they already occupied. The campaign archive publication in April 2018 documents one media asset, affirming that the anthem film served as the singular creative anchor from which all shorter executions derived. Clapboard scores 'We Were There' at 56 out of 100, reflecting a campaign that achieves clarity of purpose and tonal sincerity while operating within a relatively conventional creative framework for the Food and Drink category.
Sunkist Growers faced a specific awareness problem among younger American consumers. Associate Creative Director Chris Swanson, speaking via ckswanson.com, stated that the campaign's core challenge was to re-introduce the Sunkist brand to a Millennial audience that may not know who they are, what they do, or in most cases, thinks they are just orange soda. That confusion — between the licensed soft-drink brand and the grower cooperative behind fresh citrus — represented a meaningful brand equity gap that no advertising had addressed for over ten years.
The competitive environment in the United States made that gap consequential. In the orange juice and fresh citrus category, The Coca-Cola Company held a dominant position through its Simply Orange and Minute Maid brands, commanding significant market share, according to researchandmarkets.com. Tropicana Beverage Group represented a further entrenched competitor, with both brands enjoying decades of consistent national advertising investment that Sunkist had not matched. Against that backdrop, a decade of advertising silence carried real risk of brand erosion, particularly among Millennial consumers whose purchase behaviour in the Food and Drink category is shaped more by cultural resonance and story than by legacy familiarity alone.
Edelman's strategic response was to bypass product-feature communication entirely and appeal instead to emotional memory. The insight was straightforward: Sunkist fresh citrus had been physically present across American life for well over a century, appearing at breakfast tables, in lunchboxes, and at family gatherings throughout generations. Rather than arguing for the brand's relevance, the strategy chose to demonstrate it through the accumulated weight of shared human moments — a narrative posture that suited a cooperative with genuine institutional depth and a Millennial audience that responds to authenticity over assertion.
Chris Swanson served as Associate Creative Director at Edelman on the 'We Were There' campaign, and his account of the creative process reflects a deliberate restraint. Swanson, as documented on ckswanson.com, described the concept directly: the team chose to show audiences the moments Sunkist was a part of and how the brand had been growing right alongside people throughout all of life's moments, from big to small and everything in between. The creative brief, as Swanson characterised it, was simple and earnest at its core — a description that also captures the finished work's tone.
The campaign credits include Jordan Atlas, Cindy Chapman, Christopher Swanson, and Jennifer D'Angelo, whose collective contributions shaped the creative output as documented in the campaign record. The one-minute-fifteen-second anthem film operates as a parade of life moments in which Sunkist citrus appears not as a hero product but as background presence — the orange in the hand at a birthday, the fruit on the counter during an ordinary morning. That visual grammar aligns with the campaign's stated ambition to feel remembered rather than sold.
The decision to build a primary long-form asset and derive shorter cutdowns for platform-specific placements on Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube reflects an understanding of how Millennial attention behaves across formats. The anthem film carries the emotional arc; the fifteen- and thirty-second versions distil it to a recognisable signature. Across connected TV and streaming audio platforms including Pandora and Spotify, the campaign extended its tonal consistency into environments where Millennial consumers spend significant passive attention time, according to ckswanson.com. The overall production approach prioritised warmth and familiarity over spectacle, which is consistent with the heritage-narrative genre within the Food and Drink advertising category.
No verified performance data for the 'We Were There' campaign is publicly available in the form of brand-lift metrics, recall scores, or sales attribution figures. MediaPost published generally favourable coverage of the campaign at launch in March 2018, noting its significance as Sunkist's first national advertising effort in more than a decade, but no post-campaign effectiveness results have been documented in publicly accessible sources.
Structural analysis supports a reasonable case for the campaign's strategic coherence, if not its measurable outcomes. The decision to concentrate the creative investment in a single anthem film — and then distribute it across nine distinct channels simultaneously — reflects sound media logic for a reintroduction campaign targeting a digitally fragmented Millennial audience in the United States. The anthem format is well suited to brand-building objectives precisely because it prioritises emotional imprinting over direct response, which is appropriate for a cooperative that had not spoken to younger consumers in over ten years.
The timing across peak citrus months, from late February through May 2018, aligned commercial context with creative message in a way that strengthens environmental relevance. The campaign's primary structural risk lies in its emotional register: sincerity and quietness are difficult to sustain as competitive advantages in a category where Simply Orange and Tropicana maintain continuous advertising presence. Whether 'We Were There' generated durable brand recognition among Millennial consumers in the United States beyond the campaign window remains unverified. The Clapboard Score of 56 out of 100 reflects exactly that tension — between clear strategic intent and unconfirmed creative impact.
'We Were There' is a 2018 brand campaign created by Edelman for Sunkist Growers in the United States. It marked Sunkist's first national advertising effort in over a decade, using a heritage-narrative anthem film distributed across social media, connected TV, and streaming audio platforms to reintroduce fresh citrus to Millennial consumers.
Sunkist Growers had not run national advertising for more than ten years. As documented on ckswanson.com, Associate Creative Director Chris Swanson identified the core challenge as reintroducing the brand to Millennials who were unaware of Sunkist's fresh citrus heritage or confused it with the licensed soft-drink brand bearing the same name.
Edelman created 'We Were There' for Sunkist Growers. The campaign team included Associate Creative Director Christopher Swanson alongside Jordan Atlas, Cindy Chapman, and Jennifer D'Angelo. The campaign was announced on March 30, 2018, and ran through May 2018, corresponding with peak citrus-season months in the United States.
The campaign ran across Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, connected TV, Pandora, Spotify, digital display, rich media, and paid search, according to ckswanson.com. A one-minute-fifteen-second anthem film served as the creative centrepiece, with thirty-second and fifteen-second cutdowns adapted for platform-specific placements throughout the United States.
Clapboard scores 'We Were There' at 56 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's clarity of strategic purpose and tonal sincerity balanced against the absence of verified performance data and the inherent difficulty of sustaining emotional differentiation against consistently advertising competitors like Simply Orange and Tropicana.
Sunkist Growers originated in 1893 as the Southern California Fruit Exchange, according to En Wikipedia. Large-scale advertising began around 1907 to 1908. 'We Were There' in 2018 represented a return to national brand communication after a decade of silence, positioning the cooperative's 125-year history as a source of authentic cultural connection for Millennial audiences in the United States.
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